Brad takes a break from Mild at Heart to talk to writer, podcaster, and organizer Cindy Wang Brandt, the person behind Parenting Forward. Cindy discusses her journey from Evangelical convert to the go-to person helping folks navigate parenthood after deconstruction and in the wake of purity culture. Her new children's book, You Are Revolutionary, provides an inspiring child-affirming message that is poignant and timely.
You are Revolutionary: https://www.beamingbooks.com/store/product/9781506478302/You-Are-Revolutionary
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty in religion at the University of San Francisco, and I'm joined today by someone that I think might be quite familiar to many of you listening, and that is Cindy Wong-Brandt, who is The creator and the person behind Parenting Forward has written a book under that title.
Parenting Forward is someone who's written a brand new book that we're going to talk about.
It's called You Are Revolutionary and is just sort of the general go-to person in my mind who is doing the work talking about parenting after purity culture, parenting after deconstruction, parenting after fundamentalism in general.
So, Cindy, thanks for joining me.
Yeah, I'm so excited to be here.
Thank you.
So this is a first.
I just want to put this out there.
We have 200 episodes of Straight White American Jesus.
We've talked about deconstruction and purity culture and politics, and we've never talked about a children's book.
So this is like our very first children's book we're ever talking about on this show, and I'm super excited to jump into it.
It's especially meaningful for me as somebody who's a new parent to read a book that I just made me think I can't wait to read this to my child when the time comes.
Before we jump into your book, you are revolutionary and all of the amazing things that you are doing just in terms of helping people sort of figure out how to parent after deconstructing, parent after fundamentalism, parent after purity culture.
Would you just share a little bit of your story with us?
What was your experience growing up?
How did you kind of find yourself in evangelicalism?
I know you grew up in an irreligious home and then eventually kind of found yourself into faith, and so how did that happen?
Yeah.
Okay, so I was born and raised in Taiwan.
And yes, I grew up in an irreligious home.
So I don't have the, you know, fundamentalist parent situation like a lot of people in my audience do.
But we grew up in Taiwan and my parents sent me to an international school, which is a school founded by missionaries.
So it was, you know, an opportunity for them to give me a Western education and give me good opportunities.
This is what Chinese parents do.
But the school was founded by missionaries and so it was like, You know, it's the equivalent of like a private Christian school in America.
And so I was quickly subsumed into that evangelical subculture.
And this is why, even though I grew up, I was born and raised in Taiwan, that I'm so familiar with American evangelicalism because You know, it gets exported to the rest of us via missionaries.
It's very successful in that endeavor.
So I am a product of that enterprise.
I call myself a missionary convert.
So when I was 12 years old, I became a Christian.
And yeah, just was quite into that whole thing.
I was very zealous.
I was very serious about my Christian faith.
And I eventually made the decision to go to a Christian college, which was a very big deal because my parents invested a lot of money for me to go to a private Christian school so that I would get into a prestigious college.
And I chose to go to a Christian school, which is Right?
Not, you know, quite as elite.
But I just was so convinced that my life was to be given to God.
And so I did that.
I went to seminary and I became a full time missionary for five and a half years.
And then I started deconstructing.
That's the general timeline, but if you think about it, if we tease out the process of deconstructing, I've been deconstructing a long time, even before that.
So, but that's kind of the general story.
And I started Parenting Forward and the community around raising children on fundamentalist because I was a parent.
I became a parent.
You know, I did the evangelical thing.
I married young and had kids young.
And so when I was deconstructing, my kids were born and I was raising them.
And I felt like it was an impossible thing to be deconstructing your faith, which is everything about your worldview, identity, community, values, future hopes.
And to do all of that alongside of being a guide and a leader for my kids felt unreasonable.
So I started a community so that we can start talking about how to do this thing together.
But things developed more.
That's how Parenting Forward started.
That's how my work began.
My work sustains itself because as I continue to deconstruct my faith and continue to uncover the religious trauma that's a part of me, I am realizing more and more that the reason that I struggle as much as I do, compared to other people who may be deconstructing, who don't seem to be quite as angsty as me, is because I was converted as a child.
I was 12 years old.
I hadn't developed, I hadn't cultivated my prefrontal cortex.
And I was powerless already as a child.
And then I was indoctrinated at that time.
And I think that's a special kind of trauma.
Because the more that we're learning about adverse childhood experiences, and childhood trauma, and the way that affects our bodies long into adulthood, the more I'm realizing But what happens when you're a child, it's super impactful.
And so that's brought a lot of new energy into my work, because I'm realizing, okay, if you want to really heal and resolve some of our religious trauma, we got to look at what happened when we were kids.
And that is a really good exercise for our own healing.
And but it can be depressing, because we can't change it.
And it was something that happened to us.
But there is something that we can do.
Which is that we can help children of today and in the future not go through the same kind of trauma that we endured.
So that brings me a lot of hope and meaning into my work, and that's how I sustain my work emotionally and with meaning.
We share some things in common in the sense that, you know, we don't, as you said, we don't have those four and five generations of evangelical family members, or we don't have the long lineage or the genealogical tree that goes back into the Southern Baptist Convention, and turning our back on that means turning our back on great-grandpa who started this church and blah blah blah.
In some ways, I used to think it was easier, right, to deconstruct in that scenario.
And now I think it's just a different kind of difficult because we had a before and we had a different culture.
And obviously our stories are very different, but what I'm getting at is you had parents who were irreligious and sent you to this school, and you end up converting in a way that just, as you used the word, subsumed you.
And so not only did it change your dynamic with your family, But it took you away from, in essence, the kind of culture or home life that you were sort of brought up with, right?
Like when I converted, my dad looked at me like, what is this?
Like, why do you want to go to church all the time?
What is this youth group?
Why are you wanting to go on mission trips?
I mean, that kind of stuff I think stays with you.
I mean, I'm wondering if that's just part of what has been a lasting dynamic in your deconstruction process.
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